Creation timestamp and last update timestamp with Hibernate and MySQL

If you are using the JPA annotations, you can use @PrePersist and @PreUpdate event hooks do this:

@Entity@Table(name = "entities")    public class Entity {  ...  private Date created;  private Date updated;  @PrePersist  protected void onCreate() {    created = new Date();  }  @PreUpdate  protected void onUpdate() {    updated = new Date();  }}

or you can use the @EntityListener annotation on the class and place the event code in an external class.

You can just use @CreationTimestamp and @UpdateTimestamp:

@CreationTimestamp@Temporal(TemporalType.TIMESTAMP)@Column(name = "create_date")private Date createDate;@UpdateTimestamp@Temporal(TemporalType.TIMESTAMP)@Column(name = "modify_date")private Date modifyDate;

Taking the resources in this post along with information taken left and right from different sources, I came with this elegant solution, create the following abstract class

import java.util.Date;import javax.persistence.Column;import javax.persistence.MappedSuperclass;import javax.persistence.PrePersist;import javax.persistence.PreUpdate;import javax.persistence.Temporal;import javax.persistence.TemporalType;@MappedSuperclasspublic abstract class AbstractTimestampEntity {    @Temporal(TemporalType.TIMESTAMP)    @Column(name = "created", nullable = false)    private Date created;    @Temporal(TemporalType.TIMESTAMP)    @Column(name = "updated", nullable = false)    private Date updated;    @PrePersist    protected void onCreate() {    updated = created = new Date();    }    @PreUpdate    protected void onUpdate() {    updated = new Date();    }}

and have all your entities extend it, for instance:

@Entity@Table(name = "campaign")public class Campaign extends AbstractTimestampEntity implements Serializable {...}